An FMM-FFT accelerated integral equation solver for characterizing electromagnetic wave propagation in mine tunnels and galleries loaded with conductors

Reliable wireless communication and tracking systems in underground mines are of paramount importance to increase miners' productivity while monitoring the environmental conditions and increasing the effectiveness of rescue operations. Key to the design and optimization of such systems are electromagnetic (EM) simulation tools capable of analyzing wave propagation in electromagnetically large mine tunnels and galleries loaded with conducting cables (power, telephone) and mining equipment (trolleys, rails, carts), and potentially partially obstructed by debris from a cave-in. Current tools for simulating EM propagation in mine environments leverage (multi-) modal decompositions (Emslie et. al., IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., 23, 192-205, 1975; Sun and Akyildiz, IEEE Trans. Commun., 58, 1758-1768, 2010), ray-tracing techniques (Zhang, IEEE Tran. Vehic. Tech., 5, 1308-1314, 2003), or full wave methods. Modal approaches and ray-tracing techniques cannot accurately account for the presence of conductors, intricate details of transmitters/receivers, wall roughness, or unstructured debris from a cave-in. Classical full-wave methods do not suffer from such restrictions. However, they require prohibitively large computational resources when applied to the analysis of electromagnetically large tunnels loaded with conductors. Recently, an efficient hybrid method of moment and transmission line solver has been developed to analyze the EM wave propagation inside tunnels loaded with conductors (Brocker et. al., in Proc IEEE AP-S Symp, pp.1,2, 2012). However, the applicability of the solver is limited to the characterization of EM wave propagation at medium frequency band.